RipTen Videogame Blog » videogame-violence

Batman Comic Writer Says Videogame Violence Not Real Enough, Questions What Gamers Really Want

Chad Lakkis — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:29:50 +0000

Landry Walker, a writer who has worked on DC Comic’s “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” as well as “The Incredibles”, published an interesting article on the web sharing his views on videogame violence and what he thinks gamers really want versus what they say they want.

He claims to have come to this realization while watching a friend play Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkahm Asylum game. The sheer fact that Batman was actually taking damage was beyond him as he repeatedly told his friend that someone like Batman was’t supposed to get shot in the first place, but beyond that he was even more taken back by the fact that the impact of the rounds fired into the Dark Knight didn’t seem to cause any visible agony or distress to the character.

Landry cites his own personal encounter with gunfire as an example:

I’ve been shot at a couple of times. I don’t mean I was sitting at the TV waving a controller around so a little pixel person could dodge cyborg powered armor piercing poison tipped bullets. Nope. These were just bullets from a simple and boring hand gun. In each instance, the bullets missed. Lucky me. Because there were no handy first aid packs or carefully planted green herbs lying around waiting. If I had been shot, I expect it would have been amazingly unlike a video game. Assuming the bullet did not inflict irreparable harm to my body, the experience of actually being shot (let’s assume a grazing strike to the shoulder) would have likely done irreparable harm to the cleanliness of my pants. Yes. I realize the imaginary bullet hit my imaginary shoulder. You do the obvious math on how that correlates to the un-cleanliness of my pants.

He goes on to explain how he believes that gamers don’t want reality in games despite what he has heard them say on multiple occasions, and then proceeds to contradict himself in a way by saying that he would personally like to see more realism in games in the hopes that those playing walk away with a greater appreciation for the magnitude of the scenario they happened to survive:

Time and time again, I’ve heard people claim that they want to see a greater degree of realism in video games. But that’s a lie. We don’t want realism. We want fantasy. We want unlimited ammo and we want rapid respawns. We want to jump out of second story windows without a scratch. We want to dodge bullets and shake off mortal wounds without pause.

I want a game that recreates that insane rush of endorphins and adrenaline or whatever it is after hearing a simple bullet crack past your ear. That’s what games should be. So real that I just have to put down the controller for a minute because some part of my lizard brain is shaking in disbelief over the scenario I somehow managed to survive.

While I don’t think that the game Landry describes in the tail end of the quote above would be very fun at all, mainly due to my belief that reality is no where near as easy to survive as fantasy, I do agree that most gamers don’t want complete realism.

I wrote a similar article on Ripten back in 2008 titled “Fun versus Reality: How Real Do You Want It?.” Reality does not neccessarily equal fun, though I think that somewhere along the line things got mixed up and companies started making the assumption that with Next Gen power and graphics everything had to look and play as if it were real. That is not and should not be the case.

I had a professor in college once say that the look/style of something, be it a comic or a movie or anything for that matter, doesn’t matter nearly as much as the consistancy of the product. In other words, you can draw an entire comic or make a full feature movie using stick figures, and if the look is consistant enough that your audience buys into the world you will have done a good job.

What do you think? Are the majority of gamers saying they want reality in games without knowing exactly what “real” is? Or do you believe that the increased power of consoles has sent developers and publishers down a path that’s more focused on flexing their technological muscle?

Source: Elder-Geek

Professors Say Videogame Violence Connection Not So Brilliant

Chad Lakkis — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:24:23 +0000

Guinness draft illustrates connection between hot wings and violence.

Ok, maybe not in those “exact words”, but not since the Guinness beer commercials have two supremely educated individuals come to a conclusion more “brilliant”.

Professors John Kilburn and Christopher Ferguson of Texas A&M International University reached out to GamePolitics a few days ago (sorry, I’m still recovering from my WoW addiction) to point them in the direction of a “meta-analytic review” they published in the Journal of Pediatrics.

In short, their conclusion states the following:

“Results from the current analysis do not support the conclusion that media violence leads to aggressive behavior. It cannot be concluded at this time that media violence presents a significant public health risk.”

A bulleted list outlining their findings is available for you after the jump.

In the last 10 years, video games studies have been overwhelmingly popular compared to studies on other media.
Less than half of studies (41%) used well validated aggression measures.
Poorly standardized and unreliable measures of aggression tended to produce the highest effects, possibly because their unstandardized format allows researchers to pick and choose from a range of possible outcomes.
The closer aggression measures got to actual violent behavior, the weaker the effects seen.
Experimental studies produced much higher effects than correlational or longitudinal studies. As experimental studies were most likely to use aggression measures of poor quality, this may be the reason why.
There was no evidence that video games produce higher effects than other media, despite their interactive nature.
Overall, effects were negligible, and we conclude that media violence generally has little demonstrable effect on aggressive behavior.

Source: GamePolitics

Kid Accused of Being “Grand Theft Auto Sex Beast” Convicted and Sentenced

Dylan Duarte — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:45:55 +0000

When I saw the headline “Grand Theft Auto Sex Beast is Caged,” I knew I had to report it. I mean, not only is it more sensationalist anti-video game bullshit, but there was a sex beast on the loose! Thank God he was caged!

Ryan Chinnery of Kent, England, was arrested in September for sexually assaulting four women. Yesterday, he was convicted for two of the attacks and sentenced to at least four years in youth custody.

So here’s the deal: this kid went out cruising for ladies of the night and, in a two month span, attacked four women in a sexual manner (that weren’t hookers at all). In the worst case, he grabbed a 42-year-old woman by the throat and they toppled down an embankment into a river, and she broke her arm in the process.

The kid was finally caught when police matched DNA found on one of the women to him. At first he claimed to be at home playing on his computer when the attacks happened, but he eventually broke down in tears and admitted.

The kid claimed to have played a lot of Grand Theft Auto, but nowhere in the article does he allude to mimicking the game or the game influencing his actions in any way. Still, the prosecutor was quoted as saying that GTA “may go some way to explaining his attitude towards women.”

Admittedly, you can do some pretty nasty things in the Grand Theft Auto games, including beating and killing hookers. This is obviously the connection that the prosecution is trying to draw, but I have another theory.

While it is true that you can abuse hookers in Grand Theft Auto, it’s a very small portion of the game. Now, the article doesn’t say which Grand Theft Auto Chinnery was a fan of, so I can’t say whether or not the feature was entirely optional. I can’t remember what – if any – mandatory missions included interactions with prostitutes. Still, from a gamer’s standpoint, hookers are far from the main draw of the Grand Theft Auto games. So why would Chinnery choose to emulate this aspect of the game?

Grand Theft Auto didn’t invent the concept of paying women for sex. In fact, prostitution has been called “the world’s oldest profession.” Nor did the video game series invent the concept of molestation. Molestation is a very real problem that happens on a daily basis.

What if Chinnery was a sexual predator before he even fired up a Grand Theft Auto game for the first time? If we’re to believe that his actions were indeed caused by GTA, wouldn’t he be shooting people and running over pedestrians with his car, two acts which are much more prevalent in the game than beating hookers? Or perhaps he was drawn to that aspect due to a pre-existing problem?

The Grand Theft Auto games are rated Mature for a reason. Immature, impressionable idiots like Ryan Chinnery shouldn’t have access to the games, especially if they aren’t mentally stable to begin with. I’m not claiming that Grand Theft Auto played no part in Chinnery’s decision – I’m saying that if it did, that part was simply pushing him over the edge, the same way a violent movie or maybe a porn flick would have. Yet you don’t see the film industry or the adult industry causing the same ruckus that the videogame industry has. In the end, this kid’s actions are a result of his sick and twisted mind and I am truly glad that he got what was coming to him.

The Sun: Arrested, Convicted

Two Teens Kill 7-Year-Old Girl with Supposed Mortal Kombat Moves

John Kershaw — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 06:05:54 +0000

Heather Trujillo (sister) and Lamar Roberts (boyfriend) charged.

Two teenagers have been charged with killing one of the pairs’ own 7-year-old sister using alleged Mortal Kombat imitation moves. The 16 and 17 year old teens were babysitting the child while the girl’s mother was at work when the incident happened.

The two teens reportedly hit, kicked, and body-slammed 7-year-old Zoe Garcia, causing “a broken wrist, more than 20 bruises, swelling of the brain, and bleeding in her neck muscles and under her spine”, the affidavits have said. Prosecutors are claiming the teens were imitating “wrestling moves” found in the Mortal Kombat video game.

The 17 year old Roberts claimed he was downstairs at the time, drunk and playing video games, but witnesses told authorities otherwise. One witness stated that according to Roberts, Zoe pleaded with them to stop wrestling with her, but he did not stop. When asked why he refused to stop, Roberts answered “I don’t know; I was drunk.”

There is no defense for this kind of crime. The pure malice you need in order to kill a 7 year old girl that brutally does not come, nor is there any evidence it comes from, video games. The fact video games are being dragged into this horrendous debacle is indicative of the current state of affairs and only reinforces the publics misconceived perception regarding the impact of videogame violence.

If the two teens are convicted, they face up to 48 years in prison.

Read the full story here.